It was painful to see the cold, stern pride which rose and swelled in that woman’s bosom, lifting her form haughtily upward, and quenching the color from her lips on which the last cruel words of that interview were forming. “Leave the room; leave my house forever!” she cried, pointing to the door. “Go, hide your infamy, and tell those romances among your proper associates.” “I shall neither disgrace nor use any name with which you have been connected,” she said in a voice so steady and low that it fell upon the ear with singular impressiveness. “In my misfortunes you will find no record which can wound your pride or bring disgrace on the name of my mother. I have no permission to use the name of my husband; but he will return, and standing by my side call on you to retract the insults you have heaped upon me. Until then I will perish in the streets, rather than look you in the face or darken your door. “Oh, aunt!” she continued with a burst of feeling, “you have been very cruel to me, terribly cruel in your doubts, for I am honorably married and as honestly loved as you ever were.” Mrs. Judson drew herself back with haughty uprightness, and pointed her finger at the girl. “You compare yourself with me!” she exclaimed,—“with _me_?” “No,” answered the girl, standing before her aunt, pale and proud as herself, but with a pride that had a relenting dignity in it, that sprung from the womanliness of her nature so fearfully outraged,—“no, aunt, I do not compare myself with you,—not for a moment. Let that Great Being make the comparison, who looks upon us both as we stand: you, a rich, proud woman, turning your sister’s child with insult into the street; I, a poor, friendless girl, feeble from sickness, tortured with anxiety, without shelter, and without a human being to care for me—let God make the comparison between you and me. Let him judge us two!” The young woman turned, as she spoke, and walked from the room, leaving her aunt standing like a statue in the clear gas-light. The passion of that young creature had paralyzed her. She, so unused to contradiction, so imperial in her household, had she lived to be thus braved? What right had that miserable wanderer to call upon the God that _she_ professed to worship? She would not have been more astonished had a pauper knelt beside her on the velvet-clad steps from which she monthly communed, in the most fashionable church of the city.